USCCB has a new website

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Tis_Bearself

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…and it’s awful. I can’t find half the documents I used to reference, the text of Scriptures is all sans serif now and very light, the calendar no longer appears on the same page with the readings and no longer contains the color coding, and the whole thing appears to be formatted for vision-impaired tablet users who barely have a nodding acquaintance with Catholicism.

I will be using this new USCCB site as little as possible in the future and probably getting both the iBreviary and Universalis apps as soon as I replace my phone(s) (current ones are old and not functioning well).
 
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I just looked at the site and didn’t think it was that bad - until I clicked on the daily reading and saw the font and the light lettering. It is difficult to read. There is too much white space for my liking. I don’t care for sites that have big block pictures to click to get to a certain topic. I like a general alphabetical index. Too bad they made so many changes.
 
Yes - awful. I suspect it is formatted for smartphones. On my computer it does look like I should be reading, “Look. See Jane run. Run, Jane, run.” Part of the great dumbing down in the culture - and followed by many in the Church - for some time now. It’s not looking good for us, these days.
 
Yes, definitely a disimprovement. Can the light-colored lettering be more legible on any kind of screen? I don’t think so. Sans serif, in itself, isn’t all that bad, and I can imagine that on some screens, and in certain formats, it might be more legible than the usual roman fonts. But the pale gray color is clearly counterproductive. One could almost suspect the designers had been bribed by Bible Hub, Bible Gateway, and Study Light, to attract users away from the USCCB …
 
I agree. In addition to the difficult navigation, the USCCB site has become reactionary to the socio/political causes du jour that prevail in mainstream media. Disappointing. I go to pray in the morning hoping for some prayerful silence and focus, and the site is noisy with political action.
 
I could let all the big emphasis on “social justice” slide if the parts of the site I use, namely the daily readings and the online NABRE, were legible and didn’t look like “See Jane Run” as someone said.

I also thought their section on “What does the church teach on _____” and there’s about 50 topics alphabetically was helpful.

But yeah, overall not good. I’ve been deleting all the bookmarks I had to parts of that website and replacing them to the extent I can with bookmarks to the old site in Internet archive.
 
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The Bible readings do format fine on mobile, so I think the comment about the site being designed to be more mobile friendly is true. However, I’ve no idea why they went for a lighter gray font. Perhaps that feedback specifically would be something easy to change and something they’d be open to change?
 
I had to look to see for myself. I’m using Chrome on a MacBook. Everything seems OK to me, the columns are wider, the fonts are bigger. The older site was a little compressed and more difficult to read.
 
Gray type in white is so counterproductive–why would anyone do that?

What they really need is older designers who can format for all ages!
 
Tis_Bearself said:
and it’s awful.
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I agree.

I use the USCCB website readings through the calendar for my weekly bulletin. And now, not only is it way more clicks and and such, but the abbreviations for the readings in the header are now formatted in a way where I can’t highlight and copy them so I have to TYPE it all into the bulletin under my “next week’s readings” for each day.

USELESS.
 
Formatting for mobile devices is not dumbing down, it is responding to users.

For.our parish, 90 percent of traffic is from mobile devices. At our Diocese training for social media, we were presented with the overwhelming statistics, and encouraged to format our webpages for mobile devices.
 
Aside from the fact that I’ve been able to read the scripture from USCCB on my Android and iPhone for about the last three years without undue hardship, there are ways to update the look of a site and make it “cleaner” and more modern-looking and even more mobile-friendly without making it harder to read and use.

My first job out of college was as a tech writer, and we spent a lot of time learning to format text in a manner that was easy for the eye to read and for people to follow. Colors, fonts, contrast, spacing, etc. A lot of pages formatted for the Web are done by designers, not people who actually read a lot of text (like the Bible) on the web.

My guess is that the USCCB will get enough complaints over the Scripture sections that it will eventually tweak the format.
 
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I just looked at it and I agree – it’s awful. The main thing I use on the site is the Mass readings and it took a while to find them. The gray-on-white text is hard to read. Definitely a 👎
 
I dislike the fact that they broke the URL links. Now everyone will have to update bookmarks and 3rd-party sites that linked somewhere to the USCCB site.

Where is the search function? Where is the site map?

I don’t find the text overly difficult to read, but I can agree that the sans serif is a little annoying. It could be worse, it could be much worse. Remember how someone–was it USCCB? Took a Catechism and locked it into a complex “app” that prevented a lot of common functions? With this USCCB bible I can still copy-paste, the footnotes are still accessible, the functionality is still there. Personally, I prefer to read the RSV-CE on my EWTN mobile app (Truth & Life Bible).

Yes, much of this redesign is to make the site mobile-responsive. It is unfortunate that the demands of mobile devices should cause the crippling of websites for desktop users. The World Wide Web was conceived with very idealistic motives: that designers would be able to write one web page that could be viewed by many disparate clients and degrade gracefully. Now we have abominations like Google’s AMP…
 
I didn’t mind the layout, but it would have been nice if the site told me, you know, where to go.
 
adamhovey1988 said:
it would have been nice if the site told me, you know, where to go.
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I feel like it is saying something to me along those lines…

I decided to go over to an O.Carm site since I couldn’t find the Lectio Divina resources on the new USCCB site, and the book the USCCB published for 2019-2020 on that subject is not available for Kindle. Carmelite Brothers have Lectio Divina resources every month for free on their website in PDF or Kindle format and it’s better written too. Yay.
 
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Things like font and background pictures are, I think, pretty easy to change. An email to them might be worthwhile. A lot of styling can be adapted and changed.
 
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I have no major objections to the new design, but I’m not one to talk since I don’t use it much.

I’m a proponent of high-contrast text (black letters on white background), but it seems the text is dark enough on my desktop computer screen, and noticeably lighter on my phone.
 
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